By Ted Barnes, 21 February 2025
Canadian Naval Review
For years, some Canadians have asked for a strong military, strong borders, strong northern presence, and a whole shopping list of procurements to replace worn out equipment and fund NORAD and 2% of our GDP for NATO. The people who advocated for this were ridiculed by elected officials and the public. Successive governments have had half measures and kicked the can repeatedly down the road as election promises to portray an illusion that the government was serious. US and NATO officials wag their fingers at us knowing we are not serious and, up until only recently, we have enjoyed the assumed protection of the United States. Canada was happy with the status quo. The election of Donald Trump has turned that upside down with tariff threats and accusations of lax borders and Canada, in absence of a better word, freeloading and enjoying the protection of the United States — so much so that the US President either jokingly or not thinks we should become the 51st state. This has panicked people and our response to this is being used a political distraction in Canada in my opinion.
Lately I have been hearing on social media including this forum that we should pull out of agreements, and procurements with the United States because of tariff threats and threats of annexation. The United States is being booed during the anthems at hockey games, people are not travelling to the United States, it is starting to spiral out of control. Much of this is pettiness. We all know that the US President is erratic and says lots of foolish things. Former CRCN Mark Norman has called on the government to do exactly that and there is no way back. So far it has not come to anything, but this may very well happen soon with a leadership change. Normally Canada enjoys a close military relationship with the United States. I personally remember dozens of US port visits on Canadian warships where we were always treated well. We got more out of the relationship than we gave. Now all of that is in peril.
Do you have any idea of the disruption and cost of halting our military procurements from the US, and what it would cause Canada through penalties from broken contracts and agreements? The CSC would be years delayed, the P8’s which we now have crews training with the RAF would cost us years. We are about to send a contingent of sailors to the AEGIS school for training for the CSC. Procurements of missiles, F 35 and everything else US would degrade our military further and further delay us for years. It is not just a simple matter of getting new suppliers — our procurement moves at a glacial pace in the best of times. Do we want to pull out of NORAD or any other miliary cooperation with the United States?
Do we want to pull all our embedded personnel from US missions and US bases and vice versa. Do we want to expel US personnel from Canada. Do we want to stop joint operations to the North or warship visits to US ports? Where does it stop? Some US allies like Saudi Arabia, Japan and others get it by investing significant resources in the US economy and buy massive amounts of military equipment, guess what? They do not have tariffs levied against them.
We knew Trump was coming to power and how erratic he was, and we did nothing to prepare. We should have reached out months ago. For the last eight years, the Trudeau government openly made fun of Trump and his government and now, we are reaping the whirlwind. What we should have been doing as a sovereign country was strengthening our borders and strengthening our military. We had a weak response in both those areas and now have a ridiculously small military and lots of unwanted guests that were forced on us due to lax border policies.
Trump wants to see himself as a winner and that is the key to all of this. What we should have done is ask for a massive rearming of the military from US sources to meet and exceed our 2% GDP promise instead of kicking the can down the road, and this would have been seen as an investment into the US economy. Trump would see that and move on. Now we have a government officials and leaders calling on shutting off strategic minerals and energy from them and escalating the situation further. That would not end well for us. I think going forward we carefully consider the consequences to our security before we drop or pull out of any procurements or agreements and use logic to guide us instead of emotions.